Age verification is coming with the Online Safety Bill. It’ll force the choice of blocking content to ensure platforms are suitable for children or make all users verify their age.
This is “a huge boon to age verification companies, for little practical benefit for child safety, and much harm to people’s privacy.”
The newly passed Online Safety Bill poses "a huge threat to freedom of expression with tech companies expected to decide what is and isn't legal, and then censor content before it's even been published".
We're about to see prior restraint imposed across social media for UK users: a particularly draconian form of censorship that bans content before publication.
A court doesn't judge content to be illegal, that's up to tech companies. Or, the algorithms those companies will use to identify such content, leading to over-moderation.
The Online Safety Bill also poses a huge threat to freedom of expression with tech companies expected to decide what is and isn’t legal.
Automated moderation will censor content before it’s even been published, re-introducing prior restraint for the written word for the first time since the 1600s.
Young people could be denied access to large swathes of the web, including resources for information and support.
I understand that speaking out against the Bangladeshi government can be risky, but if I don't, who's to say I won't end up in an even worse situation? It's a tough spot to be in, you know? 🙁
Every one of the contributing writers to The Uncaged Voice — Stories by Writers in Exile has escaped arrest and torture in countries where #FreedomOfThePress and expression is more aspirational than realized.
Age verification leaves only a few options for platforms with UK users. All of them lead to a less open, less functional and less free Internet.
The Online Safety Bill risks a disproportionate interference with children’s and adult’s right to access information, and their freedom of expression rights.
ORG's Exec Director @jim explains the risks to privacy and freedom of expression of age verification requirements.
Freedom of expression includes the right to receive information to form opinions.
Keeping children safe online is a worthy goal, but we need to ensure that we do not restrict children’s right to information by banning them from large swathes of the internet.
20 odd writers are under police protection for fear of life in just one of the Indian states #Karnataka. Only becoz they are progressive, pro-poor and raise their voice for an egalitarian society, which the right wing in India can't tolerate. State of freedom of expression.
🚨 A legal opinion skewers the legality of an anti-democratic clause in the Online Safety Bill (UK).
Requiring social platforms to screen content and block what's 'illegal' marks a sea change for freedom of expresssion in the UK. #censorship#OnlineSafetyBill
#Wikpedia#Portugal#SLAPP#DataProtection#Privacy#FreedomOfExpression: "César de Paço’s lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation is an ongoing legal case in Portugal that raises serious concerns about privacy and free expression. We are concerned that this is a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) designed to suppress well-sourced public information. We are fighting this case for two reasons: 1) to protect the user data of volunteers contributing to political biographies; and, 2) to set an important precedent protecting the ability to write biographies of living persons."
European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Grand Chamber. Hurbain v. Belgium. From the ECtHR’s summary: ‘Newspaper publisher [in Belgium] ordered to anonymise the online archived version of a lawful article published twenty years earlier, on grounds of the “right to be forgotten” of the individual responsible for a fatal accident’. ECtHR: Belgium did not violate freedom of expression. https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre#{%22itemid%22:[%22002-14115%22]}#humanrights#law#freedomofexpression#privacy
Freedom of expression and media freedom are firmly anchored in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. It's considered important for democratic societies to be able to tolerate a variety of opinions, even if they offend religious sensibilities.
However, provocations against religious communities repeatedly spark debate about the limits of this freedom.
The reason Sweden allows Quran burning despite international anger.
Recent public desecrations of the Quran by a handful of anti-Islam activists in Sweden have sparked an angry reaction in Muslim such as Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, but the country has no law against blasphemy, and protections for freedom of speech.
"Shouldn't there be some inquiry into how the telecommunications giants are privately suppressing opinions they don't like or agree with on social media networks? Because you are supposed to send my message from Point A to Point B. You are not supposed to tell me what those messages say, I decide what my voice says, not 2 Degrees, not Spark, and not bloody Vodafone."
This week the European Court of Human Rights found that using facial recognition to locate and arrest a protester travelling in Moscow violated the right to #freedomofexpression and #privacy.
@petersuber Florida's Constitution-beater DeSantis & his junta need to be expressly reminded, that the First Amendment also applies to the state of Florida & its anti-constitutional governor & regime:
=> Gitlow v. New York (1925), SCOTUS ruling.
"Congress shall make no law... ...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;..."